The Invitation: Escape with this epic, page-turning summer holiday read

*

Hal

Showered and dressed, Hal is summoned to breakfast. The terrace in front of the house, which the night before had supported the band and the bar, is now set with a table bearing breakfast fare. A whole salmon glistens – rather raw and naked-looking in the strong light – beside dishes of charcuterie and cheese, a cornucopia of fruit: strawberries, oranges, grapes; a basket of burnished brioche loaves and other delicacies. There is champagne, but Hal gives this a wide berth. He loads his plate with food, feeling hollowed with hunger after his swim. As he lifts his fork to his mouth it shakes slightly; his body still electric with adrenaline.

Signor Gaspari is there, his little dog on his lap, and next to him sits the photographer, Aubrey Boyd. Hal gestures to the seat next to Aubrey.

‘May I?’

‘By all means.’ Aubrey’s plate, balanced on his lap, bears five segments of grapefruit, fanned out in a bloom-like pattern. He probes one with a fork, speculatively.

‘Not hungry?’

‘Oh, I can never take much in the morning – and I intend to wear a thirty-two until I die.’ Aubrey appraises Hal. ‘You certainly seemed to enjoy yourself last night.’

‘Yes,’ he says, queasily remembering the final drink. Something about a chicken.

Aubrey Boyd watches him, amused. ‘I saw you disappear off into the gardens late on. So I think you missed Giulietta Castiglione dancing in little more than her bathing suit. Spontaneous, apparently. That little white dress simply happened to disappear at some point and then – pouf – there was a great deal more of Giulietta. I got some excellent shots.’ He sips his water. ‘You’ll get to meet her properly on the trip, of course. I’ll introduce you – I took the promotional shots for A Holiday.’

‘Thank you,’ Hal says. ‘In fact,’ he says, with careful disinterest, ‘there was someone else, too. I met her this morning – though I didn’t see her last night.’ He decides not to mention the previous encounter. ‘I wonder if you know her?’

‘Describe her to me.’

‘Her name’s Stella. I don’t know her surname. She’s blonde …’ he is about to say beautiful, but stops himself in time. ‘Short hair,’ he says, instead. ‘American.’

Aubrey frowns. And then he seems to think of something. ‘An odd accent, though?’

‘Yes.’

‘Oh yes,’ Aubrey says, slowly – with something slightly cruel in his look. ‘In that case I think you have met Mrs Truss.’

It takes several seconds for Hal to digest this. ‘Mrs Truss? She’s …’

‘That American investor’s wife? Yes, old chap.’

‘You’re sure?’

‘I don’t know her first name, but I rather think it must be her, from your account. Ever so glamorous. Hair the colour of money. She’s quite something, is she not?’

Suddenly, certain elements fall into place. Her reticence in telling him anything about herself, her haste in leaving the following morning. Her horror at seeing him on the jetty.

‘Oh,’ Aubrey says. ‘Why – there she is now.’

Hal looks up. There she is indeed, looking quite different to the person of a couple of hours earlier. A white shirtdress, heeled sandals, her hair combed. She is well suited to him, the elegant man appearing behind her in his blue suit. They are a matched pair, he realizes: they make more sense together than apart. His hand at her back – a caress, or possibly a steer.

So he was the one-time adventure, the penniless young man in his garret. He thinks of the smallness and shabbiness of the studio, and wonders if that was part of the thrill. He should have known, then, seeing the wealth she wore about her. Hair the colour of money, indeed.

He watches her, compelled in spite of himself. He thinks that his eyes would be drawn to her even if he did not know her: there is something innately watchable about her; the unique grace with which she moves. It does not appear affected. But who is he to tell? He knows even less of her than he thought.

He watches her husband too. He had decided he did not like the man, but perhaps he should pity him. Hal has made him that old-fashioned word: a cuckold. Except that he is not a figure that invites pity.

The Contessa has appeared now and is greeting them, offering them both champagne. Stella is shaking her head, but he – Truss – takes one for them both and hands her a glass. He is steering her towards the end of the table now, nearer to Hal. She glances up and catches sight of Hal watching her. Good: he rather wants her to see, to see that he understands now what she is. She looks quickly away.

She finds a seat at the furthest possible distance away, says something to her husband – her husband – and sits down. But Truss does not appear to be happy with her choice. He is gesturing to the patch of shade thrown by the parasol, only a few feet from Hal. She shakes her head. And Hal watches as the man takes her by the arm, and half-lifts her out of the seat. He isn’t quite able to believe what he is seeing. To anyone glancing over, it would look as though he is merely helping her from her chair. But to Hal, who has watched the whole interaction, it is something different. He sees the firmness of the grip about her upper arm, the expression on her face: vacillating between humiliation and fear.

He feels in some way that she has let him down. Being married to a man like Truss, a rich man’s wife, makes her ordinary. There are women like her on the Via Condotti every day, stepping from cars, trailed by their hapless spouses. Sweeping past the doorman at Bulgari, trying on, no doubt, the biggest, ugliest, costliest baubles they think they can get away with. And then to Caffè Greco, to compare these new spoils with the others of their species sitting about them. He has never paid these women, or their husbands, any heed before. They have been so far outside his own sphere, and his Rome, that they might as well have been from another planet. If he had thought of them, well, it might have been with something approaching contempt. He can see, now, reflected in the morning sun, the wink of gems at earlobes and wrist. He supposes that at least she has managed to find herself a wealthy man who is not fifty years her senior, balding and fat. Perhaps by the standards of such women she has landed a coup, even if he is a bully.

And yet … she didn’t seem the sort, to be bought off with trinkets. He would have credited her with more intelligence, a greater sense of self-worth.

He catches himself. One evening – and a few brief moments this morning – that is the sum total of how long he has known her. He knows nothing about her. It is nothing but the work of that pernicious thing that once served him so well in his writing: the overactive imagination. She had told him so little about herself that he couldn’t have known anything about her. And it is a relief that he has found out the truth. Now she will take up no more room in his thoughts.

6

Her

I am sure that when people see me, they see someone weak. And they would be right: I am. I wasn’t always, though.

I hadn’t thought about the girl I used to be for a long time. I hadn’t spoken her language, the old language, or even thought in it. Maybe I dreamed in it sometimes, but if I did I tried to forget that as soon as I woke. And then, a year ago, something happened that made me remember her.

I suppose I need to go back to the beginning.

To Spain, 1936.

To a town, cradled in the lee of the surrounding hills. It has been there since medieval times, under the sun. Red roofs and cobblestones, green fountains and moss, scent of coffee and aniseed.

It is there that I think I left her, the girl that I was. Or perhaps somewhere on the road to Madrid.

The last good memory.

June. A very hot night, too hot to sleep indoors, though the farmhouse was built to keep the warmth out. So my father – Papa – makes a makeshift tent for us, of old canvas and furniture. A gauze net over the opening, to keep the bugs out. An oil lamp for light, blown out once we have bedded down. Papa, my little brother Tino and me. We lie there with the dark surrounding us.

I didn’t know how alive the night could be before now. Deprived of all other senses, in our soft cocoon, it is cacophonous. We lie there listening, as my father names the sounds for us: the fluted exclamation of an owl, the frog music, low and guttural. Then, through the opening to the dark garden, the biggest miracle of all. Living pinpricks of light, much closer than the stars, but seeming for a moment to borrow their brilliance. Las luciérnagas. The fireflies.

They remind me a little of Papa. When you find yourself in the spotlight of his interest, there is no greater feeling. And then without warning, it will blink off – he will have made his way on to something else. He is a man of great passions, though most are fleeting. Our education was one. He removed us from school, claiming that our heads were being filled with religious dogma, announced that he would teach us himself. At first, he was wonderfully dedicated to it. He spent hours with us in his study, a generous – if sometimes impatient – tutor. As with his views about many things, his idea of what children should learn was a little eccentric. As a result, I got a good grounding in Greek philosophers, Spanish literature and German political theorists, speak English well and French passably, but know almost nothing in the way of basic arithmetic. Then, one day, the lessons stopped. He needed to focus on the second book: he needed us out of the study, actually … out of the house, making as little noise as possible. They never resumed.

The garden was another. Papa didn’t think of it, after a while, though he had grand plans for it at one stage. Once, when my aunt and uncle came to visit from Madrid, they helped to clear the weeds that had grown over the vegetable beds. They always seemed to enjoy spending time with Tino and me – they have no children of their own. My uncle, Tío Salvador, cut canes for beans and made bird-scarers for our fig tree. Tía Aída showed us how far apart to plant the potatoes, carrots, lettuces. All the while my father sat in his study, hammering away so hard at his typewriter we could hear the clack of the keys outside, above the chatter of the crickets.

The passions that remain steadfast: his writing, his politics, his country. He is a great man, Papa. His first book, about the struggle for a modern Spain, made his a name to conjure with. It has been read by the people that matter, as Uncle Salvador said, even if wasn’t a bestseller. Besides, the next book – more ambitious, more polemic – will be the one to make his name.

We love him helplessly. At times, desperately.

Often, he is away from home. He will go to Madrid to give lectures. Or he will go on his crusades: to poor peasant farmers in Estremadura, to industrial workers in the Basque country, explaining the concept of Socialism. It is not so bad. We always know he will return. I am fifteen now, nearly a woman. Besides, even when Papa is here I do most of the work about the house. He isn’t lazy, he simply doesn’t see the need for such things. While he is working on his second book – which he has nearly finished – he would quite happily live on hunks of stale bread, and let the house fall down around us.

I have always looked after Tino, too. My mother died giving birth to him. She was English, and extremely clever: my father met her studying at Cambridge. She had been told that she probably wouldn’t be able to have another child, after me. But she had been determined, as she was about many things. I thought I might never be able to forgive the baby for it, that I might hate him. But when I saw him for the first time – truly saw him, with his solemn dark eyes and pale silk of hair – it was as though he had reached out with his little fist and taken hold of my heart. From then on, it was his. I knew that I would fight like a lioness to keep him safe from harm.

Tino is a dreamer. He will spend hours drawing in his sketchbook, fantastical diagrams that seem to bear no relation to anything glimpsed in life. Except I asked him, once, what they were and he told me: ‘the bees’. As I looked, I began to understand. He had watched them move from flower to flower, and had tried to replicate the various paths of their flight with his crayons: a different hue for each bee. So what looked like nothing more than a great tangle of colour was actually something strangely logical, and oddly beautiful. That is a fitting description of his character, I think.

While other six-year-old boys might be pulling the wings off flies, Tino is content to watch his bees for hours, learning their secrets. On any given day, if you were to look from the windows of the kitchen, you would be able to see the top of his head above the stone wall that separates the main part of the garden from the hives. There are six hives in total, producing far more honey than we would ever be able to eat ourselves. They were another fleeting interest of Papa’s. Luckily, Tino’s love for the bees has far outlasted his.

To my eyes the movements of the insects appear aimless. But Tino has explained to me that the bees are organized, incredibly so. There are patterns to their movements, varying from season to season, that he is learning to read. He has told me about the queen, the female workers, the male drones. How they build and clean their hive, how they make, dry and store the honey, how they could make a new queen, if they needed one, in a special cell in the honeycomb. The ordinary worker-bee larva becomes something extraordinary, becomes a mother. Just sometimes I think that if we could make ourselves a new mother – or if we could make me into a real adult – things might be easier for us.

That evening, when we camped in the garden, above all of the other nighttime sounds I remember that of Tino’s breathing, fast with the wonder of it all. I felt his hand reach for mine, and I took it, and held it tight.

‘Can you see them?’ he asked.

‘Yes.’

We watched them, the dancing points of light, for so long that even when I closed my eyes I could see them there, imprinted somewhere behind my eyelids.

That, then, is the last good memory. It has taken me a while to bring myself to remember past that point.

July 1936

It is a few weeks later, a July morning. I discover Papa listening to the radio. When I ask him if he wants me to make him a coffee – he drinks several cups a day, thick and black in the Turkish style – he makes a quieting motion with one hand. I listen with him, to see what it is that has him so excited.

There has been an incident, in Morocco, the announcer says. A young soldier has led some soldiers into an uprising there. They are trying to make their way to Spain. This is not the thing that frightens me; the man on the radio insists that it will be snuffed out within twenty-four hours – if that. The frightening thing is my father’s face, when he turns to look at me.

‘It’s coming,’ he says. ‘I knew it would happen. I’ve been saying it for the last year. But they’ve become complacent.’

‘But the man says—’

‘He says what they think people want to hear.’

‘Hear what?’ We turn, and see Tino, trailed by his elderly cat, Señor Bombón.

My father is, I think, about to tell him – but I get there first. ‘Nothing, Tino,’ I say now. ‘It’s nothing.’ For what is the point in a six-year-old worrying over something that does not concern him, that will be over before it has even begun? Especially a child who has terrible nightmares already: whose imagination is an overly fertile place. Even innocuous-sounding phrases – a chance mention by my father of ‘the trees in the distance’ turned those trees into one of his great fears. When he woke up screaming one night and I went to ask what the matter was, all he would say, as he clung to me, was: ‘los árboles, los árboles’. Sometimes, still, he wets the bed – a thing that we have to keep a secret from Papa, because Tino can’t bear the shame of him finding out.

Now, when he looks unconvinced, I say: ‘I’ve been wondering, something, Tino. About the bees. Perhaps you could explain it to me?’

It is a low trick, perhaps, but it works.

How long, though, will I be able to hide it from him? Because the thing is not crushed. Not in twenty-four hours, not in forty-eight. It spreads to the mainland. It moves through the country like a forest fire, snatching new fuel to feast upon. Seville, Cordoba, Saragossa, Papa tells me: all have fallen to these men they call the rebels. There are soldiers, trained marksmen, marching from their barracks to massacre unarmed townspeople. Besides the Spanish soldiers – known for their skill in the fine art of killing – there are the Moorish soldiers, known too for their talent, but also for their absolute lack of mercy.

Often, now, we hear the roar of aircraft above us. Tino will run out into the garden and watch them with a kind of wonder. And there is something awesome in them: in their speed and deadly grace. They are German, Papa says: Adolf Hitler is sending them to help the rebels. Mussolini, of Italy, is sending tanks and soldiers.

We are not their target, yet. Some other small town is, perhaps – or one of the big cities. How long before that changes?

Even as I understood the danger, there was a part of me that didn’t believe it would come. Or that even if it did it would only sear us a little, it couldn’t change us. The thing we had, our happiness, was too sacred. The arrogance of imagining that I was unchangeable. That what we had was stronger, somehow, than this thing that had engulfed the whole country. That was a hard lesson to learn.

PART TWO

7

Liguria, 1953

Appearing around the dark finger of land is a yacht: the same one Hal saw on his swim. Her navy blue hull gleams, the line of her prow is as sharp as a shark’s tooth. There are gilt fittings all about, sheening in the sunlight like newly minted coins. The twin masts appear, from this perspective, to pierce the sky. Even Hal, who knows so little about boats, can recognize that she is a beautiful work of construction.

‘She is quite something, is she not?’

He turns to find Frank Truss beside him. Hal nods.

‘I own a schooner,’ Truss says. ‘She’s in the States at present, of course. Southampton. Need to get her transferred over here some time. Sixty foot – a beautiful creature.’

‘Goodness,’ Hal says. ‘I used to own a Firefly.’

Truss frowns. Hal has the distinct impression that he doesn’t like to admit ignorance on any point. Finally, he says: ‘It’s a yacht?’

‘It’s a small wooden dinghy,’ Hal says, and steps away.

Aubrey Boyd wants to take a photograph. He gestures to Hal. ‘You, dear fellow, if you wouldn’t mind. Yes, you have exactly the look.’

‘I don’t think it would be right,’ Hal says. ‘I’m the journalist. Surely it should be Giulietta, or Gaspari …’

‘Not for this one,’ Aubrey Boyd tells him. ‘Anyway, why so shy? Are you afraid that the camera will steal your soul? It’s only a little fun.’ As though the matter is decided, he attaches the flashbulb and frames the scene. Hal steps forward reluctantly and stands before the sea, the yacht behind him. The other guests observe – perhaps trying to understand the supposed perfection of the fit.

Then Aubrey finds his next subject. ‘Mrs Truss, if you wouldn’t mind.’

She smiles, politely, and tries to demur. Hal catches sight of Giulietta Castiglione, whose expression is unforgettable. She is not used to being passed over.

Aubrey is not to be deterred. ‘Please, Mrs Truss. Your blonde hair, with his dark. You look so picturesque together. The perfect contrast …’ He turns to Truss. ‘If you wouldn’t mind, of course.’

Truss nods his acquiescence.

Still, she does not step forward. Then Truss reaches over and takes her by the wrist. ‘Come on, Kitten. Do as the man asks.’ Like an errant child, she is guided to stand beside Hal. She stops a foot away, near enough that he can make out the fine gold hairs on her bare forearms, but far enough that there is no chance of any part of them touching.

Aubrey raises his camera. ‘A little closer together, if you wouldn’t mind.’ He laughs. ‘Anyone would think you two were the married couple.’

Giulietta’s co-star – the man who plays the sea captain of the film’s title – arrives moments before they set sail. Hal doesn’t recognize him immediately. He knows from somewhere the great golden head, the exaggeratedly handsome features, but can’t place them. Only when Aubrey Boyd whispers the name does he understand. Earl Morgan. He can’t believe he didn’t know him. But then there is a marked difference between the figure standing here and the heroic one he has viewed onscreen.

There is something off about the man, though Hal cannot quite work it out until he steps nearer. Up close, Morgan looks terrible. The boyishly handsome looks are marred, as though in a state of decay. There is a loose, febrile look to his skin. His eyes, his most famous feature, are still very blue, but the whites are pinkish-yellow, as though pickled.

He puts up a hand, smiling slowly as he looks about himself. Hal thinks that even now he appears to be playing a part: the star greeting his audience. ‘Hi.’ There is a resounding silence. ‘Sorry I couldn’t make it for the party,’ he says. ‘I had to catch up on some sleep, you know how it is.’

‘Mr Morgan.’ The Contessa smiles graciously at him. ‘You look well rested.’

Morgan nods. ‘Indeed I am. It seems this Italian air is the thing for me.’

Hal tries to decide whether he is imagining the slur to Morgan’s speech. He turns to Aubrey, and whispers. ‘He seems a little … well, drunk.’

‘Dear chap,’ Aubrey says, ‘he’s drunk all the time. It would be far more remarkable if he were sober. They say he’s spent the last couple of years in a spa, trying to dry out – though it’s clear he’s still soused in the stuff. He’s one of the Contessa’s little projects. I suppose we all are, in a way.’

Before Hal can ask exactly what he means, Aubrey has made his way over to Morgan, to ask if he may take a photograph.

They set sail. It is a mere few kilometres across the Gulf of the Poets to Portovenere, their first stop, but the commotion with which their departure occurs would be better suited to a ship taking off on a great voyage. The Contessa’s household staff come to see them off: some standing on the jetty, others amidst the terraces. The house soars behind, nestled in its dark bank of trees. But gradually it, too, is diminished – becomes a cottage, a child’s doll’s house.

Then there is only the water and the wind. The guests look at one another, unsure of what to do, whether to speak, like actors who have suddenly forgotten their lines. All except for Truss, who is reading the papers in one of the seats on the foredeck.

Hal glances at Stella. She stands a little distance from the group, and her gaze is turned from them. If they are all upon the stage, he thinks, she is the one waiting in the wings, hidden in its dark recesses. He remembers again how she had been in Rome. Quiet, but self-possessed. Her quietness has a different quality now; she is subdued. He looks away. He watches, instead, as Earl Morgan staggers over to the other chair and sits down. The actor turns toward the sea, until perhaps he thinks no one can see him. Then his smile – his whole face, in fact, appears to collapse in on itself. It is a horrible sight, as though the man is coming apart at the seams. Presently, loud snores are heard from his direction, and the hand that had been holding his drink slackens, allowing the empty glass to roll gently back towards them, the slice of lemon flopping onto the deck like a tiny, dead fish.